Topic: Science

Quotes

Brian Arthur, Complexity and the Economy (2015)

• Complexity is not a theory but a movement in the sciences that studies how the interacting elements in a system create overall patterns, and how these overall patterns in turn cause the interacting elements to change or adapt… Complexity, in other words, asks how individual behaviors might react to the pattern they together create, and how that pattern would alter itself as a result. This#

Anthony O'Hear, “Popperian Individualism Today” (2009)

• To think that a disposition to criticize might on its own be enough to hold a community together is itself utopian, and it could be as destructively utopian as some of the other utopias Popper correctly criticizes.#Quoted in Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

G.L.S. Shackle, Epistemics and Economics (1972)

• Knowledge and constancy are so intimately related in all science, that we can say that science is merely the recognition and description of constancy.#

D.J. O'Connor, “Determinism and Predictability” (1956)

• No prediction can distinguish the predicted event in such a way as to discriminate it from any of the other possible events that could fall under the same set of measurements…. The statement which expresses our prediction is never capable of identifying without ambiguity one and only one event whose occurrence would satisfy the prediction, for a description can do no more than specify a class of closely similar events, whose differences lie beneath the threshold of discrimination#Quoted in Gerald O'Driscoll & Mario Rizzo, The Economics of Time and Ignorance (1985)

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (1994)

• The more we succeed in giving every youngster a chance to develop his or her latent cognitive ability, the more we equalize the environmental sources of differences in intelligence. The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined differences in genes.#

Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

• It is a cliché among philosophers and historians of science that one of the most successful of all scientific theories, the theory of evolution, makes no predictions and is therefore unfalsifiable by prediction. With fruit flies and bacteria, to be sure, you can test the theory in the approved manner; but its main facts, its dinosaurs and multicolored birds, are things to be explained, not predicted.#
• At the level of broad scientific law, scientists simply use their theories. They seldom try to falsify them.#
• Flexibility is frequently praised in scientific theories and of course should be. But flexibility is simply a promise that the theory will be able to evade crucial tests, surviving unscathed from positivist tortures. Nothing could be further from naïve falsification.#
• Something is awry with an appeal for an open intellectual society, an appeal defending itself on liberal grounds, that begins by demarcating certain ways of reasoning as forbidden and certain fields of study as meaningless.#

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• It is equally improper to talk of months and years of the Divine Existence, as of square miles of Deity: and we equally deceive ourselves, when we talk of the world being differently fixed, with respect to wither of these sorts of measures.#

Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)

• The scientist often seems rather to be struggling with facts, trying to force them in conformity with a theory he does not doubt.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969)

• A minister of the gospel should not be in jeopardy every hour lest his theological structure crumble to the ground because of advances in the fields of science and philosophy of which he knows very little.#

Gabriel Zanotti & Nicolás Cachanosky, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2015)

• Because a paradigm is built on unquestioned fundamental assumptions, some of which may not be observable, and [because] a paradigmatic shift is the result of a persuasion exercise and not the result of efficient empirical tests, nothing guarantees that a change in paradigm is a step forward; it may just as well mean a step back.#
• In Euclidean geometry we know a priori of experience that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees. However, this result does not hold in non-Euclidean geometries. . . . Still, one does not announce a refutation of Euclidean geometry if a measurement of the internal angles of a triangle does not equal 180 degrees. . . . The introduction of assumed real world conditions does not affect the aprioristic character of economics just like the assumption of the type of surface does not change the aprioristic character of geometry.#
• A contradiction between facts and theory points to a problem, but it remains unanswered from the experiment whether the problem falls in the theory, in an unquestioned fundamental assumption, or in an assumed condition particular to the case under study.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• It is not a deficiency of the system of aprioristic science that it does not convey to us full cognition of reality. Its concepts and theorems are mental tools opening the approach to a complete grasp of reality; they are, to be sure, not in themselves the totality of factual knowledge about all things.#Quoted in Gabriel Zanotti & Nicolás Cachanosky, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2015)
• The evidence that we have correctly perceived a causal relation is provided only by the fact that action guided by this knowledge results in the expected outcome.#
• [T]he mere fact that we hypostatize the unexplained element of this behavior as a force and call it instinct does not enlarge our knowledge. We must never forget that this word instinct is nothing but a landmark to indicate a point beyond which we are unable, up to the present at least, to carry our scientific scrutiny.#

Fritz Malchup, “The Problem of Verification in Economics” (1955)

• Mill does not propose to put the assumptions of economic theory to empirical tests, but only the predicted results that are deduced from them. And this, I submit, is what all the proponents of pure, exact, or aprioristic economic theory had in mind, however provocative their contentions sounded.#Quoted in Gabriel Zanotti & Nicolás Cachanosky, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2015)
• The strength of belief in a hypothesis depends, even more than on any direct empirical tests that it may have survived, on the place it holds within a hierarchical system of inter-related hypotheses.#
• To establish or verify “historical facts,” we must rely on the acceptance of numerous general hypotheses (theories); and to verify general hypotheses we must rely on the acceptance of numerous data representing “facts” observed or inferred at various times and places. We always must take something for granted, no matter how averse we are to “preconceptions”.#
• To stay away from metaphysics one has to know a good bit about it.#

James Conant, On Understanding Science (1947)

• A theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts.#Quoted in Fritz Malchup, “The Problem of Verification in Economics” (1955)

Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953)

• A fundamental hypothesis of science is that appearances are deceptive and that there is a way of looking at or interpreting or organizing the evidence that will reveal superficially disconnected and diverse phenomena to be manifestations of a more fundamental and relatively simple structure. . . . If a class of “economic phenomena” appears varied and complex, it is, we must suppose, because we have no adequate theory to explain them.#

F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1949)

• The increasing preoccupation of the modern.world with problems of an engineering character tends to blind people to the totally different character of the economic problem and is probably the main cause why the nature of the latter was less and less understood. #
• if, of the infinite variety of phenomena which we can find in any concrete situation, only those can be regarded as part of one object which we can connect by means of our mental models, the object can possess no attributes beyond those which can be derived from our model. Of course, we can go on constructing models which fit concrete situations more and more closely – concepts of states or languages which possess an ever richer connotation. But as members of a class, as similar units about which we can make generalizations, these models can never possess any properties which we have not given to them or which do not derive deductively from the assumptions on which we have built them. Experience can never teach us that any particular kind of structure has properties which do not follow from the definition (or the way we construct it).#

Henry Rogers, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• The complexity of the universe is the complexity not so much of distinct principles of existence, as of relations, combinations, and modes.#
• The concentration of the faculties on some one object is indispensably necessary to profound investigation; and on the contrary, the diffusion of the faculties over a large surface is, generally speaking, absolutely inseparable from a comparatively superficial knowledge.#

Roger Koppl, Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations (2002)

• Agents with bounded rationality are guided by general rules and rules of thumb. They have, nevertheless, some cunning and the disposition to seek out and follow their incentives. Natural selection can turn this cunning disposition into a good approximation of rational maximizing, but only in the right institutional setting.#
• The interpretive sociologist uses ideal types of varying degrees of anonymity. What we call either “history” or “applied economics” entails the use of relatively concrete ideal types. “Theory” uses more anonymous types. The distinction, therefore, between theory and history is not the categorical one Mises imagined. We use the term “theory” for arguments and explanations that use only relatively anonymous types; we use the terms “history” and “applied theory” when relatively concrete types are used.#
• Methodological dualism is not the doctrine that the social sciences are “deductive” and the natural sciences “inductive.” It is the doctrine that “understanding” is a method of the social sciences, but not of the natural sciences.#

Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (2006)

• The stronger a hypothesis or belief system, the less input is needed for confirmation.#

Andy Clark, Mindware (2000)

• Precise, single-digit movements actually require more [brain] activity than some multidigit whole hand actions (such as grasping an object).#

Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature (1931)

• If, then, social phenomena depend upon more factors than we readily manipulate, even the doctrine of universal determinism will not guarantee an attainable expression of laws governing the specific phenomena of social life. Social phenomena, though determined, might not to a finite mind in limited time display any laws at all.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Counterrevolution of Science (1955)

F.A. Hayek, The Counterrevolution of Science (1955)

• If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation.#

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

• I do not believe that human altruism is a single trait, but rather that humans are more or less altruistic in different domains of activity, each of which has its own characteristics.#

Konrad Lorenz, “The Comparative Method in Studying Innate Behaviour” (1950)

• No important scientific fact has ever been ‘proved’ that has not previously been simply and immediately seen by intuitive gestalt perception.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1968)

F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1968)

• The phenomenal (sensory, subjective, or behavioural) world in which an organism lives will therefore be built up largely of movement patterns characteristic of its own kind (species or wider group). These will be among the most important categories in terms of which it perceives the world and particularly most forms of life. Our tendency to personify (to interpret in anthropomorphic or animistic terms) the events we observe is probably the result of such an application of schemata which out own bodily movements provide. It is they which make, though not yet intelligible, at least perceivable (comprehensible or meaningful) complexes of events which without such perceptual schemata would have no coherence or character as wholes.#
• Nor is the claim invalidated that we can explain the principle on which a certain mechanism operates if it is pointed out that we cannot say precisely what it will do at a particular place and time. From the fact that we do know that a phenomenon is determined by certain kinds of circumstances it does not follow that we must be able to know even in one particular instance all the circumstances which have determined all its attributes.#
• Nobody would probably seriously contend that statistics can elucidate even the comparatively not very complex structures of organic molecules, and few would argue that it can help us to explain the functioning of organisms. Yet when it comes to accounting for the functioning of social structures, that belief is widely held.#
• Until we have definite questions to ask we cannot employ our intellect; and questions presuppose that we have formed some provisional hypothesis or theory about the events.#

F.A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)

• Science thus tends necessarily towards an ultimate state in which all knowledge is embodied in the definitions of the objects with which it is concerned: and in which all true statements about these objects are analytical or tautological and could not be disproved by any experience. The observation that any object did not behave as it should, could then only mean that it was not an object of the kind it was thought to be.#
• If qualities are, as we have maintained, subjective, then, if new discriminations appear for the first time, this means the appearance of a new quality. There is no sense in saying that, if a chemist learns to distinguish between two smells which nobody has ever distinguished before, he has learnt to distinguish between given qualities: these qualities just did not exist before he learnt to distinguish between them.#
• Even though we may know the general principle by which all human action is causally determined by physical processes, this would not mean that to us a particular human action can ever be recognizable as the necessary result of a particular set of physical circumstances.#
• Any explanation of mental phenomena which we can hope ever to attain cannot be sufficient to ‘unify’ all our knowledge, in the sense that we should become able to substitute statements about particular physical events (or classes of physical events) for statements about mental events without thereby changing the meaning of the statement.#
• The ideal of science as merely a complete description of phenomena, which is the positivist conclusion derived from the phenomenalistic approach, proves to be impossible. Science consists rather in a constant search for new classes, for ‘constructs’ which are so defined that general propositions about the behaviour of their elements are universally and necessarily true.#
• A certain part at least of what we know at any moment about the external world is therefore not learnt by sensory experience, but is rather implicit in the means through which we can obtain such experience; it is determined by the order of the apparatus of classification which has been built up by the pre-sensory linkages.#
• The process of experience thus does not begin with sensations of perceptions, but necessarily precedes then: it operates on physiological events and arranges them into a structure or order which becomes the basis of their ‘mental’ significance; and the distinction between the sensory qualities, in terms of which alone the conscious mind can learn about anything in the external world, is the result of such pre-sensory experience.#
• Learning to discriminate does not necessarily produce a better reproduction of the physical order of the stimuli; it merely means the creation of a new distinction in the phenomenal order which, if it were the result of a non-recurring, accidental or artificial combination of stimuli during a particular period, might indeed prove later not a help but an obstacle to orientation and appropriate behavior.#
• No mere repetition but only knowledge of results of the attempts to discriminate will lead to an improvement of discrimination.#
• It is often difficult to decide which of our visual experiences are determined immediately by sensation and which, on the contrary, are determined by experience and practice.#
• If frequently only certain abstract features of a perceived situation can be remembered, this is maybe a consequence of the fact that only those abstract features were perceived in the first place.#
• The specific character of the effect of a particular impulse need be neither due to the attributes of the stimulus which caused it, nor to the attributes of the impulse, but may be determined by the position in the structure of the nervous system of the fibre which carries the impulse.#
• The fact that the problem of psychology is the converse of the problem of the physical sciences means that while for the latter the facts of the phenomenal world are the data and the order of the physical world the quaesitum, psychology must take the physical world as represented by modern physics as given and try to reconstruct the process by which the organism classifies the physical events in the manner which is familiar to us as the order of sensory qualities.#
• The problems of the physical sciences arise thus from the fact that objects which appear alike to us do not always prove to behave in the same way towards other objects; or that objects which phenomenally resemble each other need not be physically similar to each other, and that sometimes objects which appear to us to be altogether different may prove to be physically very similar.#
• In order to be able to give a satisfactory account of the regularities existing in the physical world the physical sciences have been forced to define the objects of which this world exists increasingly in terms of the observed relations between these objects, and at the same time more and more to disregard the way in which these objects appear to us.#

Jason Potts, The New Evolutionary Microeconomics (2000)

• The concept of a competitive selection process effecting optimal outcomes was once the paradigm of orthodox evolutionary biological theory and economics leant heavily upon this argument to buttress the analogue of a competitive market process. Biology, however, has now collected far too many exceptions to sustain this belief, and has reworked its underlying theory of the selection mechanism to reject the concept of global maximization applied to the concept of fitness. The theoretical reason for this rejection amounts to the fact that ‘biological space’ is not integral.#

Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

• Sense organs, prejudices, scientific theories, and language are alike in that they are blind to phenomena which they do not anticipate.#

Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1979)

• Knowledge never begins from nothing, but always from some background knowledge—knowledge which at the moment is taken for granted—together with some difficulties, some problems. These as a rule arise from the clash between, on the one side, expectations inherent in our background knowledge and, on the other side, some new findings, such as out observations or some hypotheses suggested by them.#Quoted in Ralph Rector, “The Economics of Rationality and the Rationality of Economics” (1990)

Philip Mirowski, “The Philosophical Bases of Institutionalist Economics” (1990)

• The Duhem/Quine thesis . . . states that no hypothesis is definitively falsified, because it can always be immunized to adverse tests by some adjustment in the ever-present auxiliary hypotheses which accompany it.#

Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)

• It is not the nature of our empirical material, but the nature of the questions we ask of our material, that determines the boundaries between sciences.#
• Observable events as such have no significance except with reference to a framework of interpretation which is logically prior to them.#

Ludwig Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

• Logic can neither prove nor disprove the core of theological doctrines. All that science – apart from history – can do in this regard is to expose the fallacies of magic and fetishistic superstitions and practices.#
• There is no way to eliminate from an analysis of the universe any reference to the mind. Those who try it merely substitute a phantom of their own invention for reality.#
• If there were no regularity, nothing could be learned from experience. In proclaiming experience as the main instrument of acquiring knowledge, empiricism implicitly acknowledges the principles of regularity and causality.#
• It may even be doubted whether it is possible to separate the analysis of the epistemological problem from the treatment of the substantive issues of the science concerned. The basic contributions to the modern epistemology of the natural sciences were an accomplishment of Galilei, not of Bacon; of Newton and Lavoisier, not of Kant and Comte. What is tenable in the doctrines of logical positivism is to be found in the works of the great physicists of the last hundred years, not in the “Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”#
• The viciousness of positivism is not to be seen in the adoption of this principle [of “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant”], but in the fact that it does not acknowledge any other ways of proving a proposition than those practiced by the experimental natural sciences and qualifies as metaphysical – which, in the positivist jargon, is synonymous with nonsensical – all other methods of rational discourse.#
• The failure of the attempts to apply the methods and the epistemological principles of the natural sciences to the problems of human action is caused by the fact that these sciences have no tool to deal with valuing. In the sphere of the phenomena they study there is no room for purposive behavior.#
• There is no reason to ascribe to the operation the mind performs in the act of becoming aware of an external object a higher epistemological dignity than to the operation the mind performs in describing its own ways of procedure.#
• The positivist doctrine that denies the legitimacy of any metaphysical doctrine is no less metaphysical than many other doctrines at variance with it.#
• What distinguishes the descriptions of history from those of the natural sciences is that they are not interpreted in the light of the category of regularity.#

Ludwig Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber (1971)

• While ‘description of the initial situation’ is a fairly innocuous requirement in nature, where all we have to do is enumerate objects in time and space, for human action this requirement cannot be met because we should have to include something unspecifiable—knowledge! A human situation without specific knowledge makes no sense. It follows that the ‘scientific method’ of the natural sciences will be of little use to the student of action because he is unable to use the testing procedure this method prescribes.#
• No ‘explanation’ which has nothing to offer beyond successful prediction of observable events can satisfy the student of action who wishes to understand it.#

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

• No expert can say from 100 miles away, and signet unseen, what this year’s grape crop is good, or even that last week’s good grapes are still good this week. By contrast, an expert on the manufacture of steel can specify the exact quality of steel that will be produced by given combinations of iron ore and coal at given temperatures. For these reasons, steel production has been successfully centrally planned and controlled in various countries, whereas agricultural production has had such chronic problems and periodic disasters in centrally planned economic systems that even the most centralized communist governments have had to make major exceptions in agriculture, allowing decentralized decision-making of various sorts.#

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943)

• Was not the observed performance [of the economy] due to that stream of inventions that revolutionized the technique of production rather than the businessman’s hunt for profits? The answer is negative. The carrying into effect of those technological novelties was of the essence of that hunt.#

Wilfred Trotter, “”

• Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man distinguished in one or even more departments of science, is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988)

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

• To collect a multiplicity of particulars under general heads, and to refer a variety of operations to their common principle, is the object of science. #

Peter Boettke, “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: Exploring the Weber-Austrian Connection” (1998)

• Since the scientific goal in interpretative sociology (i.e., praxeology) is Verstehen, not prediction and falsifiability, broadening of the concept of rationality to near tautological status does not present the problem it would in alternative concepts of science. #

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• The Christ who commended a good Samaritan for pouring oil and wine into wounds would scarcely likewise honor a man who, trained in contemporary methods of giving first aid, regarded the Biblical example as his absolute guide.#
• If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#

Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons” (1997)

• It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.#Quoted in J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know (2003)

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• For even as science has to ascend from the phenomena to the investigation of their inherent order, . . . so also it is the vocation of art, not merely to observe everything visible and audible, to apprehend it, and reproduce it artistically, but much more to discover in those natural forms the order of the beautiful, and, enriched by this higher knowledge, to produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature.#
• The conflict is not between faith and science, but between the assertion that the cosmos, as it exists today, is either in a normal or abnormal condition. If it is normal, then it moves by means of an eternal evolution from its potencies to its ideal. But if the cosmos in its present condition is abnormal, then a disturbance has taken place in the past, and only a regenerating power can warrant it the final attainment of its goal.#
• Only when there is faith in the organic interconnection of the Universe, will there be also a possibility for science to ascend from the empirical investigation of the special phenomena to the general, and from the general to the law which rules over it, and from that law to the principle, which is dominant over all.#
• The entire development of science in our age presupposes a cosmos which does not fall a prey to the freaks of chance, but exists and develops from one principle, according to a firm order, aiming at one fixed plan.#

Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)

• The development of science and technology at the beginning of our modern era was made possible precisely because procedures had been adopted that were in full contrast to those that usually result in legislation.#

Ludwig Lachmann, Capital and Its Structure (1956)

• The business man who forms an expectation is doing precisely what a scientist does when he formulates a working hypothesis. Both business expectation and scientific hypothesis serve the same purpose; both reflect an attempt at cognition and orientation in an imperfectly known world, both embody imperfect knowledge to be tested and improved by later experience.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-rationalist Liberalism” (2000)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1939)

• The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and expressions of life itself.#